Firemen seethe over memorial

New York firefighters are furious that a statue of three of their number raising the Stars and Stripes at Ground Zero has been altered because of political correctness.

Two of the three white firemen who raised the flag - Dan McWilliams, George Johnson and Billy Eisengrein - have been portrayed as black and Hispanic.

The three men, who attached the flag to a broken yacht mast in the harbour near the ruins of the World Trade Center, have said through their lawyer they were disappointed that "something historical had become political".

Since a clay model of the proposed statue was unveiled last month, complaints have poured in. The model is based on a photograph which itself echoes the 1945 picture of the US flag being raised on Iwo Jima.

Carlo Casoria, whose firefighter son Thomas died on 11 September, said: "They're rewriting history in order to achieve political correctness."

In New York 2.7 per cent of the city's 11,500 firefighters are black - a proportion replicated almost exactly in the casualty figures on 11 September. Of the 343 firemen who died, 12 were black.